Laundrette = Suffragette

In my family I am responsible for doing the laundry. I think this is a pretty sweet assignment. Usually I have to do this about twice a week and it involves stuffing my washing machine with dirty clothes, then waiting an hour... then moving these clothes into the dryer... wait another hour and then spend about 5-10 minutes placing all the items in the closet.

Not much work at all, and I love to read a book or watch a movie and hear the machines work away in the distance.

Imagine before these machines. Imagine how much time it would take to do the laundry. It would take the whole fucking day, if not two days including the drying period... and that is if the weather is good.

Now imagine you have a family of 2-3 children and a husband/wife. That is a lot of dirty clothes. You would spend a lot of time each week making sure your family is in clean clothes.

Where am I going with this?

Well the rise of the emancipation of women is practically in sync with the rise of the washing machine and the dryer. It is a fact that 100 years ago women performed all laundry duties, but when the machines came to help her week freed up.

She had more time to do something else... like perhaps try and get some basic rights in the male dominated society. And it worked. Even if not perfectly equal women are, in most parts of the Western World, fairly equal. Especially when compared to pre-washing machine times.

Now rewind the clocks back about 100 000 years. In those days we mainly wore what was left from the animals we killed. And fur basically cleans itself... more so than our current clothes at least. Regardless in those days the human race used clothes mainly to keep warm.

For a very long period we roamed. We were nomads. We were free. In a sense we lived life as it should be lived: get some food, make a fire... raise a family. Pretty simple. I doubt many people suffered from depression or stress. Sure there were problems in those days, as today, but not of the same degree.

Existence was pure, at its core... and humans lived at one with nature.

Then we started farming and thus we invented the modern concept of "clothes"... and we had to start doing the washing and this led to a lot of mindless work that further enslaved us. I am certain ancient humans did some sort of washing, but not at all to the degree we did our washing when we "settled down".

Is the women's liberation movement proof that when we remove unnecessary work we take charge of our faith, and we begin to create something better? And did our successful hundreds of thousands of years of nomadic life partially come to an end because we introduced such said unnecessary work?

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